I’m kind of shocked that such an intensive hiking trail is missing from Unilocal-world. This park is craazy. By crazy I mean super intense, steep ascents, and times where I had to pull myself up by the roots of trees. It’s not every trail I find myself holding on for dear life and scooting down a hill so I don’t lose my balance. We landed on Roland Road entrance around 6:30 in the morning and hiked for four to four and a half hours. Swayze Falls Trail isn’t the hardest trail but it’s definitely demanding. The ascents can leave you breathless and you need to be in decent shape to do these trails. Swayze Falls intersects with Black Walnut which does a loop around the Scout Camp. Black Walnut is quite grueling, where I spent 90% of my time getting my backside dirty. Black Walnut shares a trail with the horses, so steep inclines are apparently their forte. I was hoping I wouldn’t go tumbling down the path. Swayze Falls(which is now dried up) had some of the best field views I’ve seen in awhile. It’s just a bunch of tall grass, swaying in the wind. I really like how this path cuts in and out of the field to filter through the forest. One minute you’re cutting through the path in the forest and the next you’re in an open field with a single bench where you can sit and watch the grass grow. Couple of things I didn’t like: some of the markers miss… the mark. We were lost, wandering through the trees, multiple times. One path would lead to a dead end and another would loop back around and we realized we should have branched off somewhere before that point. It was inherently frustrating, especially when hiking for hours and realizing that you’re starving and wait. how many miles away from the car? All of the waterfalls are dried up here. Not sure if it’s just the time of year, but it has downpoured in the past few days and everything was bone dry. I disliked that for many parts of the trail, you could hear the road. Nature was certainly interrupted for me in those instances. Things I liked: the trails were really awesome! You could hike for hours and hours and still wouldn’t be able to see everything. Swayze Falls plus Black Walnut took around four and a half hours. BW alone was probably a good hour, not including the time we ended up getting lost on the trail. The bathrooms in the parking lots weren’t too gross and it seemed generally well-kept in the park, even though we only saw one runner the whole time we were there. These trails are worth it if you have a free day. There’s so much to see that we just couldn’t get to in one day. We did two trails out of seven and that was a half a day! So much to see and explore and paths that remained quiet from our lack of trodding. I guarantee I’ll be back. The unexplored always calls my name.
